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Workday Adaptive Planning

Workday Adaptive Planning is a leading Financial Planning and Analysis tool. Its strong points are modelling and financial reporting as well as having a comprehensive application programming interface (API).

I spent nine years at ABM Systems (now Decision Inc), Australia's first Adaptive Planning partner, and I have kept up with new releases.

Modelling Capabilities

Any good BI tool can give you a view of the past but budgeting, forecasting needs a model of the future. This usually starts as Excel. It will become apparent very quickly that Excel lacks the security and functionality to do this well. It's inefficient and error-prone which is a major risk.

A proper budgeting tool allows for separate models of income and expense to interact. It supports a security architecture that protects sensitive information and implements workflow for budget phases. There is a world of difference between a kludge of spreadsheets and an elegant, fit-for-purpose system.

Integration Capabilities

Adaptive has so many good options for data integration that it can be a bit overwhelming:

• Manual loads from Excel are how most projects start. There's no point trying to build an integration until the structures are bedded down. Many customers find manual integration all that they ever need.
• Built-in integration. Adaptive supports a good set of leading financial packages directly, making integration fast and easy. Like anything pre-built, it may not do exactly what you need, so...
• Custom Integrations may be what you need.

Adaptive allows custom integrations of several flavours

• The API allows data import and export and metadata management, including synchronising with your ERP
• Custom integrations can be scripted in Pentaho ETL tool, using agents on your own integration server
• Custom Cloud Data Source (CCDS) allows writing your own integration in JavaScript from Adaptive's cloud to any cloud source

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